Look and Feel... a red herring (Re: UNIX Expo in NYC)

[Dominic Dunlop]

[Just when you thought this thread was coming to an end...]

A while back, in article <2113 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da
Silva) wrote:
>I think the industry needs to establish a subset toolkit that does all
>the basic things (opening a window, getting events, rendering text and
>graphics, defining menus (in broad terms), poke points (gadgets, radio
>buttons, what have you), scroll bars, and so on) reasonably well. The
>equivalent of curses for window systems, if you like.

Good analogy, but.  The problem with curses is that it has always lagged
programmer and user requirements in terms of the terminal facilities to
which it is able to provide access.  Consequently, programmers have come up
with non-standard extensions in order to access these facilities.  These
extensions are a pain to maintain, both for the author, and for users --
particularly those users who have more than one set of extensions to
contend with.  Examples are

	line drawing			Introduced last year in 5.3.0
	more then ten function keys	Introduced last year in 5.3.0
	auxiliary port handling		Introduced last year in 5.3.0
	colour				Came in this year with 5.3.1
        generalised non-ASCII chars	Will arrive next year in 5.4.0

(Revision levels refer to AT&T UNIX releases.  I could be wrong about
exactly what popped up in 5.3.0, but I'm not too far out.)  

A standard ``look and feel'' toolkit for bit-mapped windowing environments
should be as comprehensive as imaginable from day one, otherwise we're
going to see the same sort of grafted-on and unmaintainable crud that we
have already seen with curses.  What's more, if some widget which is
currently unimaginable gains a following in the future, it (or a
cleaned-up, generalised version of it) must be incorporated into the
toolkit in a timely manner by whoever is responsible (AT&T?  Sun?  OSF?),
rather than five years or more later, as seems to have been the case with
curses.
-- 
Dominic Dunlop
domo at sphinx.co.uk  domo at riddle.uucp